Quantum minefields

I recently attended the Society for Psychical Research study day on theories that might explain psychic phenomena. One theme was that certain interpretations of quantum theory apparently suggest that conscious observers participate in some way in the outcome of quantum experiments. Brian Josephson, a Nobel prize winner and one of the speakers, recommended one particular paper that I was keen to read, as I’m supposed to be writing a review of the event, but I freely admit to finding the ins and outs of the metaphysics of quantum theory (1) rather technical and (2) often confusing and even contradictory.
The paper concerned is John Archibald Wheeler’s ‘Law Without Law,’ in which he speculates fairly extensively upon the meaning of experiments whose implications were disputed by Bohr and Einstein in the 1920s. (For clarity – and because I must admit to having difficulty fully grasping the ins and outs of both the experiment and the theory behind it – I recommend that the interested reader reads Wheeler’s full description of the beam-splitter experiment in his paper, and in addition the Wikipedia entry on subsequent experimental confirmations. I apologise in advance if I’ve misinterpreted this material; any physicists are welcome to suggest corrections.)

Wheeler’s paper begins with Bohr’s observation that in quantum experiments “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon” (quoted in Wheeler, 1983, p. 184). The answers we get from experiments, Bohr emphasised, are dependent upon the questions asked, the specific experimental set up and the decisions made by the observer. Another way of putting this is that the entities discussed in quantum theory are so strange that Bohr thought that we cannot discuss them outside of the context of the experiments in which their effects are observed (Midgley, 1992). Bohr’s approach distressed Einstein because it seemed to conflict with the idea that the universe exists independently of our observations of it. This is because what was observed in an experiment seemed dependent upon the choice of experimental arrangement.

As Wheeler acknowledged, the notion that the observer helps in some fashion to bring about the observed phenomenon has more than a passing resemblance to idealism, or Bishop Berkeley’s observation that ‘to be is to be perceived.’ However, Wheeler went on to claim that the situation in quantum theory differs to Berkeley’s Idealism because whilst everyday observations involved myriad quantum processes, these experiments only involved individual ones. If one observes a tree, then there are so many quanta that there is an illusion of stability.

But Wheeler goes on to compare the quantum problems with those of a tree falling in a forest, and the question of whether the fall occurs if there isn’t someone there to observe it. Even if we are absent, a fallen tree will leave indications of its fall in ‘impact points, ground dislocations and acoustic records’ (p. 187). As Wheeler goes on to say, ‘anything macroscopic in the past makes… a rich fallout of consequences in the present.’ (p. 187). And in the case of the tree, the large numbers of quanta mean that observation ‘can hardly be said to influence the event observed.’ Wheeler is stressing here the difference between observations made in quantum experiments with those made in everyday life. In the former case, one is dealing with single quanta, but in the latter, the large numbers of quanta wipe out these observer dependent effects.

Wheeler goes on to make what’s prima facie a rather extraordinary statement about the past. He says that ‘It is wrong to think of that past as “already existing” in detail. The “past” is theory .The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. By deciding what questions our quantum registering equipment shall put in the present we have an undeniable choice in what we have the right to say about the past.’ (p. 194). According to a physicist acquaintance of mine, Wheeler is not suggesting that we somehow ‘choose’ the past in these experiments, but only some model by which we interpret the past.

But this claim seems to me problematic, because Wheeler goes further: ‘What we call reality consists of a few iron posts of observation between which we fill in by an elaborate papier-maché construction of imagination and theory’ (p. 194). Wheeler, then, seems to be rejecting the idea that the world exists ‘out there,’ independent of our measurements, concluding that ‘There is a strange sense in which this is a participatory universe.’

Both Wheeler and my acquaintance both skate around the implications of this claim. Basically, if 'reality' is a combination of imagination and theory plus observation, then it seems to me that one is indeed in a sense 'choosing' the past by choosing (1) the experimental set-up and therefore (2) the theory/imaginative structure by which one interprets the results. One could, of course, do as the positivists did and say that reality is ONLY the observations, and that imagination and theory are not reality. (e.g. the crux seems to me how one defines reality in the first place)

But Wheeler doesn't do this, and goes on to speculate about the implications of this conclusion, coming very close to the Buddhist idea of ‘dependent arising’ in the process. It seems self-evident that one cannot have a human being without the big bang; but under this interpretation, one cannot have the Big bang without the human being observing it. So Wheeler speculates whether ‘billions upon billions of acts of observer-participancy are the foundation of everything’ (p. 199). He finishes by asking whether ‘all the time we have been missing the central point, the use of the quantum phenomenon in the construction of the universe itself?’ (p. 200).

Whilst reading this paper, I had to remind myself continually that this was the same John Archibald Wheeler who had wanted the parapsychologists kicked out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Trying to determine experimentally whether telepathy or precognition occurs hardly seems in the same league as proposing that the whole universe somehow comes into being because lots and lots of people observe it! In addition, building such a vast edifice of speculation upon experimental results whose metaphysical underpinnings depend upon which particular interpretation of quantum theory one uses also seems difficult.

Mary Midgley (Science as Salvation, 1992) has a number of informative things to say about this paper. Firstly, she claims – in my view rightly – that Wheeler’s vision seems fairly unequivocally idealistic. Yet she also notes that Wheeler drops the idealism whenever it is convenient. This is evident, for example, in his denial that observation is in anyway associated with consciousness (Wheeler, 1983, p. 196), instead accepting the conventional designation of observation as something the measuring instruments do.

But as Midgley notes, this collapses his theory into absurdity, because measurements can only be carried out by active, conscious observers. She is sharply critical of attempts to extend physics into the study of human subjects precisely because early on physics disqualified itself from such realms, fixating instead on the behaviour of physical objects. She also cautions against a confusion between the use of ‘observe’ in the technical sense in quantum mechanics, and its use in everyday speech. She goes on to say something very interesting:

‘Full scale idealism of Berkeley’s kind is defensible, but it has far reaching and unfashionable consequences. Traditional idealism centres on some unifying entity such as God, or a world-soul, or (as in Buddhism) a community of souls…. Berkeley did not mean that physical things just vanished when unobserved, or that they were in any way formed by human minds. They existed timelessly as a system of ideas in the mind of God….’ (Midgley, 1992, p. 209).

Without the stabilizing Great Mind or community of minds, Midgley says, idealism becomes a sceptical sort of Phenomenalism, as in Hume, where nothing exists but a flow of sensations and perceptions. In no case do the traditional forms of idealism allow for the creation of the universe by human observations in the way Wheeler suggests.

But as I was researching this, I came across a paper that claims that Wheeler’s interpretation is confusing and misleading, and which denies that there’s any way in which the experimenter’s decision in the present has a causal effect on the past. In ‘Demystifying the delayed choice experiments,’ Bram Gaasbeek claims that the experiments can be fully understood within the standard framework of quantum mechanics, and that the outcomes can be understood in terms of nonlocal correlations, and not causal influences.

He also deconstructs Wheeler’s interpretation, claiming first that the way in which Wheeler formulated the choice in his experiment was highly confusing and suggested backwards causality. Second, he holds that: “we can only understand Wheeler’s experiment correctly by treating the wave function as fundamental (particle-and-wave view) and not by holding on to strict complementarity (particle-or-wave view).” This is where things get a little hazy for me, because I do not really understand the formalisms he uses to make his point.

But in the conclusion, he writes:
“The (well-known) point stated in the introduction was to distinguish correlation from causation. The lesson we draw here is that this very correlation between distant measurements does not feel their relative time ordering: it does not distinguish between future and past. This implies backwards correlation but still precludes backwards causation or any other tension with relativity, effectively demystifying the delayed choice experiments.” (quoted in the conclusion of the paper, just before the Wheeler appendix).

What this seems to mean is that conventional quantum models can be used to understand what’s going on in the delayed choice experiments, and that the nature of the models, which do not discriminate between the future and past, suggest that nonlocal correlations are the best way to interpret the results. But it seems to me that, even if the delayed-choice experiments have been demystified, in the sense that we do not need to invoke an observer actually having a causal influence on the past, that the question of what the conventional theory actually means remains obscure. And one is left with a nagging feeling that the quandaries concerning quantum theory and consciousness, raised, for instance by Rosenblum and Kuttner in their book Quantum Enigma: Physics encounters consciousness, are still floating about out there. But I also think that such confusions means that one had to be very careful before stepping into the quantum minefield, and making any claim about the theory’s relation to consciousness.

Rupert Sheldrake, Peter Fenwick & David Lorimer in conversation

The above talk was recommended to me after the talk I gave to the SPR in March. I'm giving this blog a rest for a while, as I need a long rest from worrying about consciousness research and especially neuroscience, for personal reasons. Don't worry, this isn't the end; I'm currently cooking up some new projects in my spare time and starting to explore some new directions, including new book projects. Thanks to all my readers, and I hope to see you over at my other blog, Cosmic Citizen. Happy Easter!

Reflections on Pluralism and the mind

Click here to access a draft transcript of the talk I gave at the SPR last week. NOTE: This is a draft of a talk that I gave at the Society for Psychical Research on the 15th March 2012. Although it differs from the final speech I gave in some respects (I generally extemporise and self-edit on the day), it presents the basic arguments given in a more-or-less coherent way. If you want to hear the talk as given, you can request an audio copy from the Society for Psychical Research.

London Talk on 15th March 2012

SPR LECTURE - PLURALISM AND THE MIND by MATT COLBORN

BLURB:
"Many researchers today see the eventual reduction of consciousness to underlying biology as inevitable, but major obstacles remain. Current mainstream theory provides no coherent account of how subjective experience arises. The author traces his growing dissatisfaction with mainstream accounts and, following William James, proposes a pluralistic universe where subjective experience is irreducible to material processes."

See here for directions. Hope to see you there!

The Brain as explained by John Cleese

All I can say is that I hope my blogs are more comprehensible! But don't eat them. Seriously.

Christmas message

See also blog below for 2012 Agenda!

Agenda for 2012

Here are some jottings, inspired by recent readings of William James, Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and others. All these thinkers were asking questions that get frequently shunted aside in contemporary consciousness studies.

Issues that need to be resolved before we can have a theory of consciousness
I do not pretend to know the answers to these questions. Most are variously heretical. Sorry if they’re a bit obscure or not explicit; they’re meant as thoughts and as starting points for explorations. Comments and thoughts welcome.

General metaphysical needs:
· We urgently need to reform a tacit reliance upon a philosophy of ‘substances’, ‘powers’ and ‘objects.’ Related to this is the assumption we can easily split causal powers from acausal qualities, which is very evident in consciousness studies e.g. we're only 'allowed' to have consciousness if it lacks any causal influence whatsoever.

· We need to question the primacy of ‘things’ or ‘objects-in-themselves’ and maybe move to some variety of process philosophy, or the view that the fundamental reality can be better described as ‘process’ rather than forces acting upon passive ‘things.’

· The question of ‘causation’ needs to be addressed in the broadest sense. In particular, we need to ask questions about the variety,type and emergence of ‘causation’ and also how we define causation, action or simple change in the Cosmos.

· The notion of reductionism and the primacy of ‘bottom-up causation’ needs to be radically modified, reversed or discarded. We need to acknowledge the primacy of differing ‘levels’ and ‘layers’ of complexity that possess causal powers-in themselves e.g. explore radical emergence. In short: causal and emergent ‘skyhooks’ abound!

· We need to face up to the issue of purposiveness in the universe.

· Is the Cosmos fundamentally living or dead?

· Is ‘raw experience’ and/or consciousness a basic feature of the cosmos?

A couple of questions for physicists:
· Are atoms-in combination or fields-and-forces sufficient to ‘explain’ all phenomena in the experiential universe?

· Are there really only four ‘fundamental’ forces in the Universe from which all causal patterns can be ultimately derived? Is it correct to split force into primary, fundamental forces, and secondary, derived forces that are mere consequences of fundamental ones? Are there other legitimate ways of looking at this issue, especially with regard to biological and conscious organisms?

Specific to human consciousness:
· In general: we need to move beyond assuming we can split our findings into a ‘real, objective, prime’ physical world and an ‘unreal, subjective, illusory’ mental world. This categorization is simply too crude and dismissive to possibly do justice to the totality of experiential reality.

· The ‘self’ is a central issue to consciousness. Just what do we mean by ‘self?’ In what senses can it be considered unified and/or divided? In what senses can it be considered ‘real’ or ‘illusory?’ Again, do these categories make sense with respect to a ‘self?’ We need to acknowledge the general paucity of current attempts to explain away the self, and re-examine deep and unsolved issues thereof.

· Mental causation & free will are two primary, and subtly distinct issues. The first seems to me empirically tractable, the second belongs more to metaphysics. The issue of freedom seems to me paramount to human life, but again fraught with unresolved and maybe unresolvable issues. Again, premature certainty that we cannot be free because ‘science’ believes in strong determinism seems unwarranted. But there’s more than science at stake in this issue.

· Qualia (i.e. James’ ‘raw experience.’) These are THE mystery of consciousness, and stubbornly persist despite the mental acrobatics of certain writers who seek to deny them or recategorize them as ‘illusions’. Again, calling something an illusion presupposes a fixed, discernible and derivable ‘reality.’

Disputed human abilities:
· Range far beyond so-called psychic phenomena. There is a whole spectrum of abilities, including creativity and the imagination, mind-body effects, mystical experience, etc. that seem to be beyond the ability of current theories to accommodate. Just what are the outer limits of human abilities? How far can we develop ourselves? Can we, in fact, set ANY concrete limits to our abilities with any confidence at all?